Is Tumblr still a viable acquisition channel?
Is Tumblr a viable acquisition channel for indie founders?
After X/Twitter was shut down in Brazil, people flocked to other platforms.
One of these sites was Tumblr.
350% user growth
Tumblr has seen an incredible 349% growth in users since Brazil banned X, according to Techcrunch.
More specifically, Tumblr saw 222.99% growth in communities and 349.55% growth in users.
How big is Tumblr, anyway?
According to Statista, as of June 2019, Tumblr has over 472 million registered accounts.
That translates to 376 million unique worldwide visitors.
Interesting...is there more recent data on Tumblr usage?
According to the most recent data from SimilarWeb, Tumblr had 158 million users in August 2024. Take this figure with a grain of salt, because SimilarWeb can vastly under-report usage numbers.
How is Tumblr relevant to us, indie founders?
If you take a look at Tumblr's front page, you'll see their obvious attempts to be like Twitter. They even have a "coming from Twitter? Log in" button after you scroll a while.
Tumblr can be a great channel if your niche is on Tumblr. From what I could see, the most popular people on Tumblr blog on B2C topics, like arts, space, etc.
Opportunity: Help Tumblr users switch to the WP ecosystem
Several days ago, I wrote about a recent software opportunity. Here's the TLDR: from Autommatic (Tumblr's parent company) will migrate Tumblr's backend to Wordpress.
This will open up a slew of opportunities for people who make Wordpress themes/plugins.
You can boost your visibility on Tumblr
Tumblr has a feature called "Blaze". Buying a "Blaze" increases the reach of yours post:
We show a Blazed post as a Tumblr sponsored post to an audience of your choosing (you can select location, language, and size of audience, and target your post to relevant communities on Tumblr).
Compared to advertising on platforms like Facebook, buying Blazes is relative inexpensive.
How to see if Tumblr is a viable acquisition channel for you
First, see if people are posting about your topic on Tumblr.
Say I have an AI SaaS.
If I search for AI on Tumblr, I'll get a bunch of relevant results.
Most of the results are images, which suggests that Tumblr might be a relevant channel to me if I'm doing a text-to-image AI software, for example.
Repeat this for your own niche.
To summarize, Tumblr is a relative small social network, but it's something definitely worth exploring as a bootstrapper.
Interesting take on Tumblr. It's certainly easy to overlook it in favor of more popular services like X or Reddit. But with the influx of new users and the transition to WordPress, it definitely seems like a hidden gem for a B2C niche site. I am working on a travel recommendation site based on "vibes" and looking into gamification options for social media. The photo-centric community on Tumblr may be better served by a photo-centric product than the text-drenched mess of other sites. "Blazing" a post seems like a straightforward way to gauge interest in a particular niche without the ad expense of Meta. I'm very interested in the WordPress integration on the backend side. Do you think this will ultimately make the site more user-friendly with easier plugin installation, or will it always be more geared towards content creators and hobbyists?